Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your background?

Justin Remes: Sure. I was born and raised in Detroit, and I got a PhD in film studies from Wayne State University. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been excited by the avant-garde. I’m not sure that I even fully knew what the term meant at that time, but the works that made me feel “as if the top of my head were taken off” (to quote Emily Dickinson) were often experimental ones: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (1976). 

Richard Bright: Have there been any particular influences to your ideas and work?

Justin Remes: Samuel Beckett is a writer who has always meant a great deal to me. On one level, “nothing happens” in his plays (to quote Estragon in Waiting for Godot, 1953). And yet, with such sparse materials, Beckett manages to create works of tremendous depth, complexity, and power. Throughout the COVID quarantine, I kept thinking about the last line of Beckett’s novel The Unnamable (1953): “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” 

Richard Bright: What is the focus of your research?

Justin Remes: My research specialization is experimental cinema. When most people think about cinema, they think of narrative films like, say, Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), and Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994). I adore all those films. But I also adore non-narrative films like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1929). In this film, Buñuel and Dalí aren’t really interested in telling a story. Instead, they confront the spectator with a series of irrational and nightmarish images: a man slicing open a woman’s eyeball with a razor, ants streaming out of a hole in a man’s hand, two dead donkeys rotting away on top of grand pianos. These images are so powerful and original, they often haunt viewers for years after seeing the film. In my research, I try to analyze and “make sense” of these kinds of bizarre experiments.

Richard Bright: Your book, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (2015), is the first comprehensive study of films that do not move. Can you say something about this book and its aims, and the categories of static film you analyse with their examples?

Justin Remes: For decades, most film theorists have argued that movement is a necessary condition of cinema. For example, Rudolf Arnheim argued that “film is required by aesthetic law to use and interpret motion.” And this focus on movement pervades the very language we use to talk about cinema: We use words like movie and motion picture. Even the term cinema is derived from the Greek word for movement. But there are a significant number of films with little or no movement—films in which stasis dominates.

Consider, for example, Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), in which a static shot of the Empire State Building dominates the frame for about eight hours. This is a film in which “nothing happens” (if I may quote Beckett again). Warhol strips away everything we expect to be in a film: plot, characters, movement, sound. We’re left with a single image that subtly changes over time. (For example, as the sun sets, the image becomes darker and the building’s floodlights are turned on.) The work is a strange synthesis of cinema and photography. And it also raises a number of interesting questions for spectators. Does Empire need to be watched from beginning to end? Or can one watch just a few minutes to “get the idea”? Do we need to watch this film in reverent silence? Or should the audience discuss the film while they’re watching it? Like Un Chien Andalou, Empire is a film that haunts me. It’s so audacious, so rigorous, so philosophically rich.

Richard Bright: Your recent book, Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing, examines films without images and films without sound, as well as found footage films that erase elements from pre-existing films. Can you say more about this and the four films you examine?

Justin Remes: Sure. I discuss dozens of films in Absence in Cinema, but I give especially close attention to the following four films: (1) Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1930), an imageless film that is composed entirely of the sounds of Berlin: industrial machines, bells, voices, and sirens. (2) Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959), a completely silent film that documents the birth of the filmmaker’s first child. (3) Naomi Uman’s removed (1999), a found footage film that was creating by using nail polish and bleach to erase the women from a German pornographic film of the 1970s. (4) Martin Arnold’s Deanimated (2002), a remix of a B movie called Invisible Ghost (Joseph H. Lewis, 1941). As Arnold’s film progresses, the characters and sounds are digitally erased from the original film until all that is left is a black screen accompanied by silence.

I should add that Absence in Cinema is not simply an analysis of four rather obscure and idiosyncratic films (although it is that). It’s also an attempt to think through the importance of the unseen and unheard in cinema more broadly. The vast majority of film critics and theorists have focused on analyzing what’s present in a film: its images, its words, its sounds. This is unquestionably a valuable approach. But I think it can be equally illuminating to consider what’s absent from a film: its omissions, erasures, and silences.

Richard Bright: You state in the book that “Expectation is central to the phenomenology of absence.” Can you say more about this?

Justin Remes: Sure. We generally only experience absence when an element that we’d normally expect to be present is missing. For example, there’s usually milk in my fridge. Let’s say that one day, I’m craving a glass of milk and I look in my fridge to find that I’m out of milk. I experience that absence. Now there are all sorts of things that are technically absent from my fridge: bricks, violins, severed hands. But I didn’t expect to see any of those things in my fridge, so I don’t experience their absence as an absence. I expected to see milk, so I experience the absence of milk. Along similar lines, we expect a film to feature imagery, music, dialogue, and so on, so when a filmmaker withholds those elements, we experience it as an absence. And I’m interested in thinking through why filmmakers (and other artists) might create an experience of absence for an audience.

Richard Bright: The role of absence has been crucial in the history of avant-garde aesthetics, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s 50cc of Paris air, Robert Rauschenberg’s blank canvases, Yves Klein’s invisible paintings, the “silent” music of John Cage and Samuel Beckett’s minimalist theatre. Why do you think the role of absence has not received attention in cinema studies previously?

Justin Remes: I’m not sure, but it might have something to do with the relative obscurity of experimental cinema. I think most people with an interest in the arts have at least a passing familiarity with avant-garde art, music, and theater. In other words, they’ve probably had some exposure to figures like Duchamp, Cage, and Beckett. I’m not sure that the same can be said of experimental filmmakers like Ruttmann, Brakhage, and Arnold. When I tell people that I’ve written about films without images, for example, most people are astonished to find out that such films even exist!

Richard Bright: The films you analyse in Absence in Cinema are avant-garde and idiosyncratic. Are there examples of absence in more mainstream cinema?

Justin Remes: Sure. Consider the greatest film ever made: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The film begins and ends with a black, imageless screen accompanied by music. Kubrick uses complete silence at various points to capture the vacuum of space. And the film is all about extraterrestrial life, yet we never actually see the aliens—they exist only in negative space. As Roger Ebert wrote, “The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in how little.”

Richard Bright: What publication projects are you currently working on or have coming up in the future?

Justin Remes: I’m currently working on a book about found footage films. These are works made not by shooting original footage, but by modifying, distorting, and re-editing preexisting footage. In other words, they’re cinematic remixes. And like the films it analyzes, the book itself will be a work of appropriation: its arguments will be constructed by modifying preexisting text from selected filmmakers, art historians, and film theorists. The spirit of the book is captured nicely in this aphorism from the French poet Lautréamont: “Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It embraces an author’s sentence, uses his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.”

I’m planning on analyzing a number of important found footage films, from Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936), which remixes content from a forgettable Hollywood adventure film called East of Borneo (George Melford, 1931), to Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a 24-hour montage of thousands of film clips that display clocks or timepieces. I’ll also be writing about a work by the artist Louise Lawler called A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture (1979), in which an audience sits in a movie theater and listens to the soundtrack of a film while staring at an imageless screen. So I’m obviously still fascinated by absence. What can I say? I agree with Andy Warhol, who said, “The thing is to think of nothing…nothing is exciting, nothing is sexy.”

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